8 Comments
29
"urbe" is ablative. but duo shows it as the nominative in this lesson. it was impossible to report this mistake, so I'm writing it on this discussion. true word is "urbs," not "urbe." if the "in" preposition precedes the word, it takes the ablative form, so "in + urbs = in urbe." but again, the nominative case is "urbs."
The problem here is if we introduce it as urbs, no student would recognize it later as urbe. They are simply showing you that urbe means city. They never claim it's nominative.
- 29
it's a strange approach. but "urbe" does not mean "city." it could utmost mean "from the city, in the city" etc. no latin student can find the ablative form on any dictionary, so you should show the nominative as well.
You can't say urbe doesn't mean city. It absolutely means city, but carries extra information about its place in the sentence.
Teaching students the form used right now is a common teaching method and effective for not overwhelming students.
Edit you don't teach Latin by throwing cases at students before they know how cases work. Giving the dictionary entry with each new word would be a great way to scare students off
- 29
ok. i guess i think more strictly.
maybe the case system was not that hard to me for the fact that turkish has more cases than latin and my native language is turkish. i ignored that fact, my bad.
The majority of English speakers don't have a sense of cases (unless they've studied German or Russian). Most take a while to get the concept.
It is true the Turkish speakers understand Latin cases better than English speakers. At least, that's been my experience with my students over the last fourteen years.
